Book Image

AI and Business Rule Engines for Excel Power Users

By : Paul Browne
Book Image

AI and Business Rule Engines for Excel Power Users

By: Paul Browne

Overview of this book

Microsoft Excel is widely adopted across diverse industries, but Excel Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets. They need a better enterprise-level solution, and this book introduces Business rules combined with the power of AI to tackle the limitations of Excel. This guide will give you a roadmap to link KIE (an industry-standard open-source application) to Microsoft’s business process automation tools, such as Power Automate, Power Query, Office Script, Forms, VBA, Script Lab, and GitHub. You’ll dive into the graphical Decision Modeling standard including decision tables, FEEL expressions, and advanced business rule editing and testing. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to share your business knowledge as graphical models, deploy and execute these models in the cloud (with Azure and OpenShift), link them back to Excel, and then execute them as an end-to-end solution removing human intervention. You’ll be equipped to solve your Excel queries and start using the next generation of Microsoft Office tools.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1:The Problem with Excel, and Why Rule-Based AI Can Be the Solution
5
Part 2: Writing Business Rules and Decision Models – with Real-Life Examples
9
Part 3: Extending Excel, Decision Models, and Business Process Automation into a Complete Enterprise Solution
13
Part 4: Next Steps in AI, Machine Learning, and Rule Engines
Appendix A - Introduction to Visual Basic for Applications

Running our first rule

Now that we have Extended Services running, the KIE Sandbox web page will communicate automatically with it in the background. Clicking on Run at the top right of the Decision Editor should now make the panel appear as shown in Figure 3.17:

Figure 3.17 – KIE Extended Services input and output

Figure 3.17 – KIE Extended Services input and output

In this screenshot, we have already populated our input values (we have put world in the name field). Every time we make a change, our decision/rules run (extremely fast) and we get our response back: Hello world.

Congratulations! You have just successfully drawn your first business rule, as part of a decision diagram. And you have successfully executed that model, using the KIE/Drools rule engine (packaged as part of KIE Sandbox Extended Services).

What is happening behind the scenes – KIE Sandbox and Services

It’s not strictly necessary to understand the chain of events that happened when you updated the value...